Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. The fabrication of semiconductor devices involves sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography and etching processes to form circuit components and elements on the semiconductor substrate.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area. The number of input and output (I/O) connections is significantly increased. Smaller package structures that utilize less area or smaller heights are being developed to package the semiconductor devices. Conductive bumps such as conductive pillars are used to establish electrical contact between a chip's I/O pads and a substrate of the lead frame of the package.
New packaging technologies have been developed to improve the density and functions of semiconductor devices. These relatively new types of packaging technologies for semiconductor devices face manufacturing challenges.